I don’t think so but aren’t the rules the same across Europe?

Another conclussions would be that that they circled the ships farer than 6km, what would explain they weren´t fired Sea Wolf or Sea Cat, but not too much as they were clearly seen as well as they distinguished the bow of Brilliant and the air objects. The second ship seen in the distance seems to be Yarmouth, and the air object, the Sea Lynx. The missiles would be the rockets.

Sea Wolf was really an anti-missile system and was designed to work fully automatically targeting only incoming missiles (or aircraft) that threatened the ship. The crewmember from HMS Brilliant says:

“The computer didn’t TI [Target Indicate] them because they weren’t a threat to us, so it thought”

So the Canberras could have been in range but Sea Wolf didn’t think they were a threat. At this point Sea Wolf had never been fired in anger so the operators probably let it operate automatically but it was still a very new system with some ‘bugs’ to work out.

I’m not really sure but I think the first ship is HMS Yarmouth and the second ship HMS Brilliant. Nogueira talks of another ship bigger than the Type-42 and of the two ships HMS Brilliant is bigger, but looks much bigger due to her high silhouette.

“The leader confirmed the presence of the menace and, after seeing that ship was changing her course to point her bow towards the planes…

In the moment that the ship faced the planes, Nogueira tells, we saw that fired her missiles…”

The ship described here is behaving exactly as if she is facing an Exocet threat…..and firing chaff.

It would be interesting to place the ships…

Yes, exactly my thoughts! I haven’t had time to gather all the information and to plot it on a chart.

The second trio also seems to be flying a wrong course.

How would the Canberras navigate over 600 miles of open ocean? It does seem odd that they came across the Argentine fleet without knowing which ships they were or expecting to see them; or was that an inter-service cooperation issue?

There is an interesting story (somewhere on the internet) regarding the Napier Sabre engine…

It is suggested, that the very fine tolerances needed to make sleeve valves work, allowed for zero contamination, but alas the workforce were unable to maintain a policy of zero tolerance…

Bristol also had problems making sleeves to the high tolerance required (not quite zero) but discovered how to by mistake. Apparently the sleeves were ground first with a worn wheel and then finished with a new wheel but the result was always slightly warped sleeves.

One day a machinist ground a sleeve the wrong way, new wheel first and then finish with a worn one; result…..a perfect sleeve!

The Sabre uses the same size sleeves as the Bristol…

…Aquila (5.00” bore) but not any other Bristol sleeve-valve engines (all 5.75” bore). 🙂

…they left the 4 wheel drives (standard school run kit) at home as it was too dangerous…

I know exactly what you mean. I live close to a road which regularly floods, there is a ford set-up which is long rather than deep (it can be fifty yards long but only nine inches deep).

When it does flood, nine-out-of-ten four-by-fours take one look at it, then turn round and make a five mile detour…

…what do people buy these things for! :rolleyes:

With the carrier group were the HMS Sheffield, Glasgow and Coventry, which I think were closer to the Argentine mainland and because of this, close to the route of the bombers. I think one of this was the ship that fired against the Canberras.

I don’t think it could have been Type-42 destroyers with the Carrier Battle Group.

20.10
1 rocket fired

20.11
1 Canberra 400 miles away squawking on IFF emergency

20.15
Canberra attack we are all lying down…

20.16
Canberra 6 miles away

20.17
The Canberras that closed in on us only circled and were seen by the OOW before the RPs, pretty horrifying. The computer didn’t TI them because they weren’t a threat to us, so it thought…..18 chaff rockets fired so far…

(Ken, you’ll have to help me with some of the abbreviations: OOW – Officer of the Watch, RPs – Radar Plotters?, TI – Target Indicate?)

The above diary entries from a crew member of HMS Brilliant posted by Griffiths911 are very interesting as they were written at the time and the aircraft are definitely identified by the crew as Canberras, so they were close enough to be seen. Also the times may be significant; these times should be ‘Zulu’ (Greenwich Mean Time) which the Task Force operated on.

How do these compare with the times of the two Canberra flights?

There is also the statement by the crew of the Lynx helicopter from HMS Brilliant at 2054 Zulu that stated that a Canberra was seen circling on the Horizon, apparently in trouble ‘with bits falling off’.

It has been suggested that this was the Canberra of Captain Baigorri that had returned to search for the crew of the Canberra shot-down at about 16:45 local time (2045 Zulu?) but consider the statements below (helpfully translated by Jualbo – many thanks).

The short telegraph ordered a first flight of three Canberras (call sign Ruta) to take off as soon as possible to attack landing crafts in Berkeley Sound, just north of Stanley…..they took off at 15:33…

The bombers flight kept their course towards their target and flying almost 5 meters over sea they closed around 50 miles (90km) from it. In that moment I watched a warship silhouette in the right hand of us. “I saw it the first, Nogueira remembers, but treated not to alert the others to avoid to worry them until I could verify if she was an enemy vessel. She was a frigate, probably a type 42, and in an estimated distance of 20 miles in the right, in the way to Falklands sound”.

Shortly after this, number 3 advised me to having seen the ship. It’s the general alarm. The leader confirmed the presence of the menace and, after seeing that ship was changing her course to point her bow towards the planes, changes his position to head the flight and ordered to accelerate and to drop external wing tanks, called ‘tips’, which limit Canberra speed from 500 knots to only 365 knots.

In the moment that the ship faced the planes, Nogueira tells, we saw that fired her missiles, because the visual effect is as if she would start in fire for a few seconds. Shortly after this, they launched a second missile and I could see the columns of smoke showing their trajectories when they went up. Then I stopped seeing them and began a hard left turn. When I was totally concentrated in the manoeuvre because we still were flying in a very low level, I felt a strong impact in the plane that instantly began to vibrate.

Just after finishing my turn I can make an advice and see the steel sheets from the end of the right wing, deflected up, so the plane began to have violent turnings that I hardly controlled. Then Nogueira ordered his fellows to come back to the mainland while he would try to land at Stanley’s airport, cause didn’t know if the plane airframe would be able to resist long enough without losing the wing what would make the plane uncontrollable.

I started my way towards Stanley between rains and low clouds and found another ship, bigger than the others seen at the moment, the type 42 frigates. I can’t sure if she was a carrier or one of the great logistic transport ships. And I even saw some points flying in the air between the ship and my plane. They were probably Sea Harriers that had just taken off, if she was a carrier, or some helicopters that English used to put on a forward surveillance patrol. Then I have no option and turned again and headed towards the mainland because I couldn’t pass in that course.

It is my opinion that the Canberra seen by the Lynx crew was that of Captain Nogueira and not that of Captain Baigorri as is often reported; the ‘bits falling off’ were the wingtip drop-tanks being released. This also means that the ships that he reported as Type-42 destroyers were in fact the frigates HMS Yarmouth and HMS Brilliant and the ‘missiles’ were in fact chaff rockets.

Were there any chaff rocket close to bow in Type 14 and T-22.

The chaff rocket launchers in a Type-12 (not Type-14) frigate such as Yarmouth are positioned one group each side, at the deck edges, behind (and at the same level) as the bridge structure. They are in a similar position on a Type-22 frigate.

There is a good photo of HMS Yarmouth below (taken by Griffiths911):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HMS_Yarmouth_F101.JPG

The white object behind the bridge is a life-raft container, the chaff rocket launcher is just aft of that (the black area).

Ironically I’ve just been reading ‘Forgotten Voices of the Falklands’ (the book that prompted the start of this thread) and there are a couple of interesting accounts in there, particularly from Captain Hugh Maxwell Balfour the captain of HMS Exeter.

Following the action of 30th May he writes:

“I’d been down to ten Sea Dart missiles from twenty, and now was down to seven, and I didn’t know when I could resupply…”

Now my understanding is that HMS Exeter fired three Sea Dart missiles on 30th May, one at the Exocet which missed, and two which destroyed an A4 Skyhawk each (hence the seven remaining missiles down from the previous ten). I think I am correct in saying that a Type-42 can carry a total of twenty-two Sea Dart missiles but that two missiles are telemetry missiles that are fired at the start of a deployment to check the calibration of the Sea Dart system (hence the starting number of twenty missiles).

HMS Exeter didn’t arrive in the combat area until 21st May and didn’t shoot-down Learjet T-24 (with two missiles) until 7th June. So it would seem that HMS Exeter fired a least fifteen missiles during the conflict and had fired thirteen of these by 30th May.

That is a lot of Sea Dart missiles that are unaccounted for; the question is what were they fired at?